The value of meaning

Recently I came into dialogue with a man who is under the impression that, by means of science, humans now have a holistic working theory for everything. I do not believe this claim is a threat to the existence of God. The reason is this, even if humanity does have holistic knowledge of the universe, it would only mean that, if there is a God who created everything, God created a self sustaining universe. Regardless I kept listening.

This man then went on to claim that because humanity is tapped into 100% of all frequencies of communication, if there is a God, He would be detectable, or at least any attempts this God could make to act or communicate in our reality would be detected by scientists and we would know about it. 

Now there are a number issues with his claims here. First, if there exists a God who can rewrite the logic of our reality at will, He could do whatever He wants and we would only be able to detect it if He wanted us to.

I tried to explain this to him but he still would not buy into the fact that such a being would be able to avoid being detected by the masses.

So I took a different approach and targeted his assumption that humanity is capable of having a holistic understanding of the universe. I presented him with that following argument.

“Premise one: The basis of Science is observation; we draw conclusions about reality by observing replicable results to experiments run in a controlled environment. Further verification of results can be achieved through the observations of a third party attempt to replicate the findings. 

Premise two: The basis of observation is human senses; observation stems from the stimulation of different human senses (such as sight, hearing, and touch) creating patterns in the human brain. 

Premise three: Human beings do not have the luxury of possessing any sensory inputs that cannot be faulty or manipulated. 

Conclusion: Therefore, you cannot observe scientific results without relying on potentially faulty or manipulatable tools of observation; without relying on human senses. 

You can better assure the accuracy of these observations by increasing the number of observers. However, to an individual human being, other observers only exist as patterns in their brains created from potentially faulty or manipulated sensory inputs. Thus, individual humans have no way to confirm that the other people they observe are actual people or the result of a hallucination or manipulative technology.”

The point was to illustrate a flaw in is claim. Namely the potentially faulty or manipulated basis for everything we think we know about reality. Therefore, human beings do not have the luxury of wholistic, concrete, knowledge.

He rejected my conclusion. He believes that third party verification and the ability to replicate results nullify my conclusion. When I tried to point out that those too are subject to the same premises I presented, and thus provide no grounds for rejecting my conclusion, he wouldn’t have it and resulted to mocking me.

In the end he did not invalidate any of my premises and only damaged his rapport with me. 

I refuse to believe that all atheists are like this man, I sincerely hope they are not. Dear reader, if you are an atheist, would you provide a rebuttal for my argument if it is indeed illogical. Perhaps my logic is flawed and this man did not have the vocabulary to explain how it is. 

Furthermore, should you find my logic sound, I have a question for you. 

Why do you value your observations enough to assume they are real despite lacking any means of definitively proving they are real? 

For me, it is because find value in the idea of a meaningful existence. I hope my observations are meaningful even though I cannot prove that they are. So, I choose to exude confidence in the hope that I have by living my life, taking assurance in my observations even though I cannot truly know if what causes them is an actual reality or something else. For Christians that would be the definition of faith (Hebrews 11: 1). 

I am curious if you have a different reason, because I cannot think of one. One response I have received from an atheist in the past is the following.

Trusting your senses is a given; it is not something you have to make a choice about. In other words, you assign value to your senses by default, it is not something you choose to assign. Therefore, asking why we value our senses is a pointless question; a waste of time. 

I did not have an immediate response to this rebuttal; I had to think about it for a while. Eventually I realized that this argument paints a picture of humanity’s relationship to our senses that I find very similar to modern humanity’s relationship with technology. 

The premise that there is default value assigned to anything we depend upon is true. We do not consciously assign value to our phones, we merely recognize that they enhance our personal experience of life and thus they are valuable to us by default. 

However this premise is not always true. In the event that the trustworthiness of our phones is compromised, we are forced to acknowledge the default value we assigned our phone, and come up with a reason why our phone may be worth trusting, or why not. 

The trustworthiness of our senses has been brought to question. Now we must acknowledge the reason we value them and make a decision of if they are still worth believing.